If you type “managing change” into Google, it will claim to have 362,000,000 results. No doubt that is the usual Google hyperbole, but "managing change" also a semi religious phrase in the HR lexicon of fraud. By far the largest number of the indexed links on the “managing change” phrase relate to changing the culture of commercial companies. This because, unlike robots, human beings tend to resist changes in their established routines. The question then arises for management about how to “manage” the psychology of uncooperative human employees. (Of course, managers themselves are amongst the most reluctant to question their own way of doing things). Whole consultancy businesses are built on voodoo promises to change the cultures of client companies.

Politicians and their parties do have an interest in manipulating the outlook of electors, though this is generally more about creating the impression that current chaos is indeed being managed by the best possible leaders. On the surface, the political contest is only occasionally about bringing a population to accept that the world has changed and that they must somehow change their habits as well in a managed way. The looming challenge of climate change may be one instance of where there is a need for the careful management of the general population’s understanding.

It is curious that there is little popular discussion about or interest in managing change in human societies. In this context, the very idea of being able to “manage” change might be challenged. On the other hand, as noted above, professional influencers in the media, advertising, industry and government have an intense interest in the mechanics of managing change. They even have a new set of tools to help them. These tools are broadly called Nudge Theory. Whole government divisions and corporate departments are focused on this stuff. I can recommend a very good (and rather long) explanation of Nudge Theory from Alan Chapman in the links below.

The original psychology behind Nudge Theory technique was to gently push people in a desired direction by making it easy to be good, as opposed to commanding them to do this or that. It makes sense: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you smash me in the face, I’m going to smash you back. If you lure me with a smile and a free beer you will probably get what you want. The authors of Nudge Theory claim their intentions were to help humanity to save itself. As with fire or a knife though, tools can be used for many ends.

The important point in this instance is that the guys using Nudge Theory might be good or bad, while the people being nudged to change don’t even realize that there is an issue to discuss. At best, sooner or later on the turkey farm some of the turkeys may have a vague sense that they are being manipulated. A suspicion of this conspiracy feeling occasionally comes through in cinema themes of the day: “somebody out there knows the truth..”

2. Change Managers in Plain Sight

When we think of “leaders” or “rulers” or “managers” it is usually in terms of organization and control, or keeping the trains running on time. We do not usually think of these role types as arbiters of change even though change is often central to their daily concerns. In fact change is the most dominant feature of our era. Willy-nilly we must constantly adapt. If we pause to think, and remember a little history (not a common habit), we might notice that adaptation to very rapid change has been going on for a couple of centuries now. For example, a whole caste system of modern occupations has emerged.

It follows that ascribed managers in big institutions are not the only people wanting to set a change agenda. Interest groups of many types compete to slant benefits from change to their own advantage.

Note that although I call it a caste system because of the tenacity with which these self-sustaining groups pursue their collective interests, as individuals we may find ourselves participating in more than one “caste” (role system) and accordingly feel rather conflicted. As a cultural aside, this is a dilemma not unfamiliar to many in India as people juggle the historical caste system. Mechanisms and institutions have arisen to negotiate the processes and rewards of change amongst these occupational castes. Sometimes such attempts have failed, perhaps resulting in revolt or war. One of the institutions for change management which has emerged is democratic government, though it has many flavours. The forums of democracy in most national domains have tended to an imbalance of power over time. For example, the broad occupational caste to which the greatest influence has accrued could be called “Rent Seekers”. Modern rent-seekers embrace a broader category than the rather simpler 19th Century world originally confronted by Karl Marx.

In general rent-seekers are individuals or groups who seek to leverage their economic advantage in some way, above the value they might earn in a completely free market. Some leverage like this is not always a bad thing. For example, it can motivate people to divert effort or capital or improve standards in a field which might otherwise be neglected. At the simplest level, a householder might rent a spare room which would otherwise remain empty. Planning a career, a doctor might be motivated to seek and charge for specialized knowledge in a system that protected his status. Then there are aggregators of resources who don’t actually produce anything but save other people time and inconvenience, then seek to monopolize their position. Wholesale middlemen have commonly adopted this model, including on the Internet (e.g. Amazon.com). Yet we know from multiple daily experience that protected economic advantage for a taxi driver, or tradesman, or degree issuing institution, or multinational business etc. will force us to pay more than we think many services are really worth. In addition to all of the above, the rent seeking from organized crime, protection rackets, corruption and the traditional parasites of inherited wealth are still with us in most nation states.

The multiplying complexity of modern economies is a kind of change which owes a great deal to the efforts of rent-seekers to identify and quarantine a profitable niche from uncontrolled competition. Once established, rent seekers are generally averse to change, but also exploit the outcomes of change. The following diagram gives some idea of the interests at work in a parliamentary democracy:

3. Evolving Roles and Perceptions

For any particular individual, the transitions through life from childhood to adulthood, gender partnership, child raising, old age and then death is a process of change. All societies mark these transitions in some way. Traditionally it was done with community celebrations, after which the expectations placed on that individual in the culture changed in carefully specified ways.

In the society which I now inhabit, only a shadow of the traditional lifetime transitions remain. They have been modified and compromised in a multitude of ways. Nor are they universal amongst my peers. Australian society is host to some 200 source cultures, dissolving and merging in unpredictable ways. Growing up in this environment, I can honestly say that I was unable to figure out what was expected of me. The unspoken rules seemed to change by the day, and continue to do so. As a young adult, the process was less about managing than surviving as the ground shifted underfoot. Yet many of my cultural elders seemed unable to notice that the physical and social frameworks which supported their own worldview had crumbled to dust. There were those who claimed to plan a career instead of stumbling into it. I never pulled that off.

A culture is a design for living. The original design for living appropriate for, say, my mother who never saw a light switch until she was 12, has only fragments of relevance to me as I type this document on a computer which can store all the books ever written, and will project my scribbling potentially to an impressive fraction of the planet’s population. By the time we are 12 we have mentally embedded a working model of the culture in which we find ourselves. For most individuals, at most times in the history of our species, that was sufficient. It is no longer sufficient. The mental models of our younger life are stressed in a thousand directions daily as they confront environments for which they were never intended.

What happens to (or what can be done about) people's psychology as they are machine gunned with futures their grandmother never dreamed about? The nihilism of the so-called Islamic State illustrates one outcome to the mental and physical violations which torrential change inflicts on a culture and on individual psychology. In fact, in this sense the Islamic State phenomenon is emblematic of many other upheavals in recent history, from millenarian movements (e.g. the Taiping Rebellion which led to over 20 million deaths in between 1850 and 1864), arguably to the World Wars of the 20th Century, and certainly to the ground zero killing fields of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. So wrenching change can cause violent social convulsions. How can this effect by moderated?

If we can imagine ourselves in England or Europe as the industrial revolution accelerated out of the conservative rural countryside with its feudal class divisions, the prospects must have seemed overwhelming, confusing and at times terrifying. Firstly there were planned changes by narrow interests, such as the Enclosure Acts in England, benefitting the already well off, and casting the mass of the population into chaotic urbanization. The aristocrats and privileged elites who thought they were planning a change had expectations built on whatever knowledge of the past they possessed. Occasional visionaries aside, there was no way these individuals could have had even an approximate idea of what would unfold as an ever-accelerating industrial revolution which would stand English culture on its head, totally restructure systems of government, create the welfare state, and unleash undreamed of technologies. They could not know that the deep psychological disturbances caused by change, sweeping across millions of lives, would lead to the huge systemic breakdowns of two world wars and countless other conflicts.

We are now standing on the cusp of social and technological changes even more giddy than those which engulfed our immediate ancestors. Will we do a better job of riding such dragons? The evidence so far doesn’t look promising, partly because “we”, the initiators, are no longer a small elite. We are a distributed network of billions with technologies of instant communication and miscommunication. The scale of vast, interlocking changes has become planetary. However, a read of the comments columns in any newspaper or journal, regardless of whether it is populist or elitist, will quickly show that there is little consensus or understanding of what is going on when the issues are complicated. Completely opposed camps will loudly state their version of the truth, and quote a selective menu of facts or research to support their position. The distortions are not always deliberate. The human faculty of reason most often begins with a desired outcome, then minds become alert to whatever supports that outcome, and dimmed to whatever contradicts it. This is called confirmation bias. Confirmation bias + the instant social media spread of mass outrage = dire political outcomes.

The idea of managing usually implies selective choices amongst competing futures. For changes that are known knowns to us (i.e. predictable), wise choice may sometimes be viable. Where the issues are known unknowns (e.g. the economic development of 3rd World countries) we may try to insert at least some well-intentioned influence on change. Where the issues are unknown unknowns (e.g. new discoveries, or a life threatening meteor crash on a large population centre) we can at best only plan how to react after the event.

[more to come..]

4. How we become who we are

The
traditional job of a teacher has been to pass on learnable parts of an
existing culture to new generations. This is pretty well what happens to this
day, certainly in primary and secondary education, and also for the most part
in tertiary education.

University
professors and researchers officially have a licence to synthesize new
insights, processes and technologies which will take an existing culture to
new levels of achievement. Only a very small percentage of them actually do
this. For the most part they are clever people finding fashionable answers to
dead questions. Like the average general, they fight the last war.

Industries, public and private,
for the most part also deal in known processes, technologies and systems of
organization. As with the marketing beloved of university administrators, the
average company is decked out in slogans claiming to be cutting-edge,
innovative, agile and adaptive. However, just as in educational institutions,
companies and government departments are made up of rather ordinary people,
few of whom have the energy to be cutting-edge, innovative, agile and
adaptive. There are 24 hours in a day, maybe 8 of them in a formal work
environment. Overwhelmingly those 8 hours are filled, even for directors and
managers, by following required routines. People with disruptive ideas and
requirements are frankly unwelcome and seen as threats. This conservative
inclination is unlikely to change. After all, predictable routine is the
foundation and engine by which widgets are actually made, trains run on time,
and bankers do their banking.

3.
Why is change so culturally dominant now?

Given
our natural conservatism, how is it then that change is such a dominant fact
of life in almost all countries and human communities now? How is it that in
spite of the natural laziness and fondness for predictable routine which
cacoons most people, no matter whether they are clever or dumb, rich or poor,
that we find ourselves engulfed in new technologies, clinging by our finger
nails to disappearing occupations, and wondering how we can possibly plan 5
years ahead, let alone a lifetime ahead?

Yet perhaps the question “Why is change so culturally dominant now?” also carries false assumptions. I have already suggested that change as a phenomenon was intensely interesting to industry and government leaders, individuals we expect (often forlornly) to have some vision on larger issues, but that change as a general issue in itself really didn’t impact on the public mind.

Let me draw an analogy here about the limits of personal awareness. When I first went to work in China in 1998 I had a better than average foreigner’s understanding of Chinese culture and history (though still naïve of course). I was therefore very curious to get the views of Chinese individuals on their experience with the Chinese Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. This was a politically manufactured decade of madness at the behest of an insane and degenerated Mao Zedong. It had millions of people committing a kind of cultural suicide as children betrayed parents, cultural heritage of every kind was vandalized or destroyed, and socioeconomic life retreated to a primitive condition. (There are some parallels with the contagious madness of the Khmer Rouge killing fields in Cambodia, or the so-called Islamic State in Iraq). Surely this searing experience would be branded as an object lesson into the minds of every Chinese person? My acquaintances in Central China at first were reluctant to discuss the topic at all, especially with foreigner. As individuals came to know me, stories gradually came out. The stories were all personal tragedies of families or friends lost or ruined. I probed for some insight into the bigger picture. What would lead a whole nation of people into this kind of thing? What really caused it? Why was responsibility put aside on such a massive scale? The eyes of my new friends would shift out of focus. They had no understanding or knowledge of the big picture, of patterns and trends, of the diktats from Beijing. It wasn’t even interesting. Their interests were entirely in individual events that had impacted people they knew. History had no lessons for them.

So just as “cultural revolution” had no non-personal currency in the common mind of Chinese people, today relentless “change” in societies and groups, or even in individuals, as something which follows certain human patterns regardless of particular examples, as something which can be prepared for at, say, the level of child raising… this kind of abstract analysis of change plays little part in dinner table conversations, or in the loud opinions of drunk men in pubs and clubs. It is not headlined in tabloid newspapers, or in the evening television news. When a car factory converts to robot productions lines, it is the personal misfortune of a thousand workers who will struggle to find another job which makes headlines for a day. There is no thought or education or funding put into an impending change through automation which will throw whole populations out of work. There is no awareness amongst ordinary people, regardless of intelligence, that a wary social contract is crumbling away – the contract between the owners of capital and the labour forces their production lines once had to have. Nobody says in dinner parties that the owners industry may no longer think they need to fund a welfare state when their workers are robots (assuming the rich are dumb enough to forget that robots won’t buy the products, when the poor can’t).

- Globalization: We often hear about the changes wrought by globalization. The word 'globalization' has many and confused meanings. At the level of large corporations it often means the creation of organizations that operate across borders, create an internal culture separate from any national or ethnic community, and owe loyalty to no nation state. International trade agreements (like the prospective TPP) are often disguised vehicles for the interests of these corporations. At quite different levels, globalization may refer to worldwide spread of the same products (e.g. cars, phones), education curriculums, the internationalization of music, sport, communications etc, and not least the international movements of peoples. All of these versions of globalization have brought massive changes to lifestyles, thinking and prosperity. We may think the trajectory these changes is irreversible. Maybe, maybe not. The 'globalization' enabled by empires of past centuries all collapsed into dust, followed by centuries of small, local, warring states, living in suspicion and ignorance. Huge amounts of earlier learning and technology were lost forever.

- Dreams turning into nightmares. Once a steady state is lost, navigation is beyond the control or even beyond the imagination of most

- Only a tiny minority of humans will ever focus beyond immediate family & community

- When life becomes too complicated or too wild, the popular reaction is always to seek “simple” solutions. These simple solutions include withdrawal at one extreme, and genocide at the other. Religion is a common vehicle and/or rigid adherence to faith/magic/ideological “solutions”.

- A personal reaction to “the sky falling in” is often hedonism and a refusal to acknowledge the surrounding chaos

- One growing popular response to a culture of rapid, unpredictable change, which is seen as threatening, is a revival of traditional survival technologies at family level (see Dewey 2015 in the reading list below). Part of America's gun culture also has its roots in this kind of elemental survival mentality. Even the urban fantasty of huge 4 wheel drive SUVs might be a psychological projection of the wish for "independence" and a "simple" world.

- Individuals are biologically programmed to seek personal safety and security above all. Often the apparent pathways to these are self-defeating. The most elemental solution is to seek opportunity through mating. (As an Australian academic in Fiji, each time I worked in China, and even in South Korea, on the last day of my contracts I was approached by barely known women, who had shown no prior interest in me, wanting to marry me … )

Professional
bio: Thor May has a core professional interest in cognitive linguistics, at
which he has rarely succeeded in making a living. He has also, perhaps
fatally in a career sense, cultivated an interest in how things work –
people, brains, systems, countries, machines, whatever… In the world of daily
employment he has mostly taught English as a foreign language, a stimulating
activity though rarely regarded as a profession by the world at large. His
PhD dissertation, Language Tangle, dealt with language teaching
productivity. Thor has been teaching English to non-native speakers, training
teachers and lecturing linguistics, since 1976. This work has taken him to
seven countries in Oceania and East Asia, mostly with tertiary students, but
with a couple of detours to teach secondary students and young children. He
has trained teachers in Australia, Fiji and South Korea. In an earlier life,
prior to becoming a teacher, he had a decade of finding his way out of
working class origins, through unskilled jobs in Australia, New Zealand and
finally England (after backpacking across Asia to England in 1972).